Deeplinks Blog posts about File Sharing

In the wake of the $220,000 verdict against Ms. Thomas, for file-sharing, some have asked whether she can avoid the judgment by filing for personal bankruptcy. The question is a complicated one, and, as it happens, EFF posted a memo last summer explaining the law in this area, for those who may be interested. (Note, it has not been updated since 2006, so further research would be necessary to uncover any more recent precedents.)

Four years after it began, the Recording Industry Association of America?s (RIAA) campaign to intimidate music fans by randomly singling out individuals for lawsuits has, for the first time, made it to a jury trial. Despite the RIAA's previous claim that defendants have no right to a jury trial, Jammie Thomas had her day in court in front of a jury sworn to examine the evidence in a fair, impartial manner. The verdict is now in: Thomas was found guilty, and will be liable for $220,000 in penalties ? $9250 per song.

For years now, EFF has been arguing against the strongarm tactics of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its vain attempt to stop filesharing by dragging music fans into court. At the same time, we?ve also been tirelessly promoting the idea of Voluntary Collective Licensing (VCL) as a solution that could give fans what they want, while ensuring that musicians get paid. Lately, these formerly fringe ideas are garnering broader respect after a few mainstream stories about the RIAA lawsuits and VCL.

We've been receiving a lot of inquiries from people concerned about recent allegations that Comcast is interfering with its subscribers' use of the BitTorrent protocol, perhaps by using an appliance that disrupts BitTorrent sessions. Some of the people contacting us are Comcast subscribers who've had trouble with BitTorrent recently and think that they might be affected by the same problem.

Debugging network problems can be complicated because of the varieties of versions and configurations of client software and the number of places in the network where problems could occur. Most mysterious network errors aren't intentionally caused by anyone. But some ISPs and universities have experimented with appliances that block or disrupt particular traffic, such as VoIP or P2P file-sharing traffic.